Posted
by
ScuttleMonkeyon Monday February 01, 2010 @03:11PM
from the too-many-weekend-lawyers dept.

garg0yle writes "According to some folks, watching the Super Bowl on a television bigger than 55 inches is illegal. Is this true? Yes and no — long story short, if you're in a private residence you're probably okay, but if you're running a sports bar you may technically have to negotiate a license with the NFL. Just don't charge for food, or call it a 'Super Bowl' party, since the term itself is copyright."

I'm using my 60" TV and inviting 40 people.We'll all sing Happy Birthday Super Bowl (slightly late).I'm serving home-made McNuggets and KFC style fried chicken.I'll be charging for food.I'm using a HD PVR to record and re-broadcast it over my open WiFi hotspot.I'm also streaming it live over the internet to anyone who wants to watch.

Sometimes I think it will be the NFL that finally breaks the camel's back of copyright mutation rather than the MPAA/RIAA idiots. The NFL takes the farce of "intellectual property" to such absurd levels that even congressmen might be able to see the lack of clothing.

To be fair, it does make sense for NFL. The summary is little bit bad worded, but you are perfectly fine to watch it at home with friends, on any size TV, as long as isn't considered public place like a sports bar, church or workplace and you do not explicitly charge for viewing the game. You can however ask for compensation on foods and drinks.

I don't think it's that hard to see what is considered a home and a public gathering place. It's not that stupid for NFL (or any other sports league or movie studio) to ask for compensation if their content is being shown on a public place to many people and they're profiting from it.

You have a point, and splitting the cost like that is actually allowed where I live (as long as its happening at ones home) But if you have a bar and ask people to pay to see that match, it's a different business.

I quickly looked over the prices for cable channels (don't have PPV events here), and the prices per channel are20 euros for home,45 euros for public places like malls (people can walk in freely),13 euros for workplaces, schools and such.

Good lord, it's depressing how completely corporations have people brainwashed.

you're using other peoples entertainment content to create a nicer place, which in turn creates you income.

No, you're using entertainment you *paid for* in a way that suits you. No different than buying a carpet to put on the floor to create a nicer place. That particular instantiation of the carpet design (which isn't yours) is yours by right of purchase. Nobody gets to tell you who can walk on it, admire it while doing whatever it is people are doing in the nice place. They can't even tell you that are not allowed to charge peop

Good lord, it's depressing how completely corporations have people brainwashed.

you're using other peoples entertainment content to create a nicer place, which in turn creates you income.

No, you're using entertainment you *paid for* in a way that suits you.

....

* And don't start talking about how "it's licensed, not bought" either. Try to tell someone the carpet they bought is "licensed, not bought" and see if you can finish talking before they start laughing and throw you off of their "purchased, not licensed" property.

No but I can give you another example. If you're living on rent, you're not allowed to do just anything you want to the apartment. You need to ask your landlord if its acceptable, and he will probably make sure it's done correctly, or if he doesn't like it, he will deny you from doing it.

Now try to still do your "I'm gonna open this wall and break windows" thing and then tell in court that "but I was just using what I *paid for* in a way that suited me".

Now if you actually bought the apartment, things are different and you can decide yourself. Otherwise you're getting it at certain rules and you have to follow them.

In most locations, renters do have some codified rights that limit what the landlord can do. Those rights are legal under the constitution for states or municipalities to set.

For copyright, there are some normal rights (fair use) that have not been formally codified enough and so don't really offer protection. There are other rights (first sale), that can't be protected by states or smaller locales any more because the Supreme court has held all copyright related

It's not that stupid for NFL (or any other sports league or movie studio) to ask for compensation if their content is being shown on a public place to many people and they're profiting from it.

The event is broadcast over the air (almost) everywhere in the US. Anyone can watch it if they have a TV and an antenna. The NFL gets paid from advertisers, not viewers. It's really not clear why someone should be punished for making a public broadcast publicly viewable. One could even argue that superbowl parties increase the number of viewers (it's more fun in a crowd), and in fact each person who watches makes the advertising that much more valuable. You really can't put you "content" out there publicly (over the air) and then bitch about who sees it where.

Some new "licensed" or "official" content required you have DRM approved connections every step of the way to play it. That means an approved machine, an approved tv, an approved HDMI cable, every single step must be on the "ok to run licensed content" list. The handshaking constantly between them all causes problems - as does any DRM given enough time.

Some new "licensed" or "official" content required you have DRM approved connections every step of the way to play it. That means an approved machine, an approved tv, an approved HDMI cable, every single step must be on the "ok to run licensed content" list. The handshaking constantly between them all causes problems - as does any DRM given enough time.

Which brings us right back to needing pirated content to be certain it plays properly on a given system . . . D'oh!

I don't know, this one might strike people as weird, but I'm not so sure.

If you had the idea to start up a $1 movie theater for profit, it sure would be nice if you could buy a $30 blu-ray version of a recent movie and show it to hundreds of people, but I don't see it as some huge injustice that this isn't legal. There really is a difference between watching something in your home, with friends, etc and a for-profit public performance. (And you can bet that the lawyers would be all over a theater that tri

It's not nearly so simple. The legal landscape and market are very complicated. For example, if you changed the law to allow public showings of consumer-aimed DVDs, that will cut into the separately-marketed and priced versions currently legal for such use. Thus, the $15 DVD you can currently buy will go up in price to offset the lost revenue. So in some sense, the reason you can buy a "reasonably" priced copy of the movie is that its production is subsidized by the other market.

I'm not saying it's right, but you really shouldn't be so knee-jerk about this. The content producers and providers do need channels to make money, and while I generally agree that copyright laws are a mess right now, taking away every method they have to be profitable is not a solution for anything. All the slashdot wankery aside, this is a big problem: how do you maintain a viable production industry when their product becomes free to copy. For music or live theater, you can wave your hands about performance revenues, etc, but there's not an equivalent for movies or television programs. Most of the simplistic stuff thrown around here is a joke in this regard. A whole self-consistent system needs to be constructed. That's hard.

"Thus, the $15 DVD you can currently buy will go up in price to offset the lost revenue. " No no it wont. This is not even close to a truly competitive market. If it were prices would be a lot closer to $1 than $15. This is far far closer to an ideal monopoly than anything. In which case these firms have priced their product at "$15" to maximize their profit in that market. The market for DVDs is far far larger than the market for "public viewings". Since the market for DVDs would dwarf the market for publi

Depending whether you think movies with multi-million dollar production are good or a load of steaming shit really colors one's perspective on this question. Not that I don't see the difference between public and private viewing of video; it's just that I think the distinction matters far less to those who don't have an artificially strong control over their market. And for something like the Super Bowl, which nearly everyone watches, it's absurd to have laws that prohibit you setting up a screen bigger t

If I read Sports Illustrated [cnn.com] correctly (though this is from 2006), not even 1/3 of US Americans watch the Super Bowl (~95M out of ~320M) and maybe another few million around the globe outside the US.

That makes the claim that "nearly everyone watches" it a little vacuous.

I thought this was fairly obvious, but "need" meaning that if we want these art forms to survive in the modern high-quality, high-production values state, somehow the expensive equipment, labor, and training need to be paid for.

Yes, I think it's a bad thing if this goes away. I think we benefit not only from having art and entertainment, available, but from having high quality art and entertainment available. Independent of whether this means we need homogenous, national or world-scale products, it's in everyone's interest if it's feasible to support oneself through the production of art in its various forms. Further, in the case of TV and movies, this can go beyond art, to include news, philosophy, educational materials, etc. There is a real problem that revenue sources that have traditionally supported, e.g., news-gatherers and aggregators are drying up, and it's not at all obvious who is going to replace those and how they'll be funded.

It's completely fair, and I encourage everyone, to question whether copyright (and patent) laws are sensible and lead to sensible outcomes. However, you need to do a real educated analysis, and go beyond knee-jerk handwaving and really understand the economy that is built on the current laws and how our society depends on the products. Revolutions can be good and necessary, but a lot of them leave things worse off than they found them, so it behooves us all to be careful, thoughtful, and well-informed as we try to change the world.

The thing is, I dare the super-bowl to try and attack some of the clients I helped set up a super-bowl party for. One is a big time lawyer who will have 2 150" screens and 5 62" plasmas all blasting the game for his 100 guests. He's a lawyer for a firm that will eat the NFL for lunch and crap in their cheerios.

I honestly will gladly allow them to copyright the hell out of it IF they play in arenas that were not built by any public funds. Otherwise everything NFL must be Public domain.

I honestly will gladly allow them to copyright the hell out of it IF they play in arenas that were not built by any public funds. Otherwise everything NFL must be Public domain.

You want to be careful with that sort of restriction. In the interest of fairness, everything that you produce should be in the public domain as well -- unless you've never used electricity from a utility company which received public grants or subsidies for construction, you've never used public roads, public transportation, or public sidewalks to get to work, and you've never used the United States Postal Service.

Your work is subsidized in many ways by government funds, some subtle, some conspicuous. Principled stands can have some very surprising consequences.

I don't think it's nearly as absurd as RIAA shenanigans. It really boils down to the argument over whether or not a game of football can be copyrighted. Certainly, the commentary should be, but that's the network's, not the NFLs. The game itself? I don't think so, but I'm not an expert. If you allow that the game footage is the copyright of the NFL, then their behavior (in this instance) is reasonable, or at least, follows a reasonable interpretation of existing laws (even if you might view said laws themselves as unreasonable). Copyright has a concept of "public performances", which are the exclusive right of the copyright holder. Historically, this has been quite important. Say you're a playwright. You mail out your play to producers, hoping one of them picks it up. Now, without the exclusive right to public performances, that producer could take the four copies you mailed him, and the dozen you slipped under his door and into his mail box and under his windshield wipers, hand them out to actors, and put the play on without paying the author a dime. In terms of encouraging playwrights to write, this is quite the undesirable outcome!

On the other hand, perhaps interpreting showing a TV program or movie as a "public performance" in the same sense that putting on a play is, is taking it too far. I suppose just putting a DVD in a machine is easier than putting together a play from a script, so it may make sense to treat it as at least as bad. But alternately, the purpose of the manuscript is to be put on, and earn the writer money from that performance. The purpose of a DVD is to be sold and watched, and it was sold and now you and some other people are watching it, so perhaps it's not really the same thing at all. After all, if it's legal to buy a DVD, then rent it to 10 people for $1 each, it should be equally legal to show it to 10 people in your living room for $1 each. And yes, though the studios want it changed very badly, rental is explicitly allowed under the doctrine of first sale, being a temporary change of possession, not a public performance.

The only way to fix this perceived imbalance, without breaking other things, would be to do away with public performance rights as a special case. I think writers would still be just as protected, as long as you establish concretely that any movie/play/whatever based on a script is categorically a derivative work, and therefore a copyright violation if not properly licensed. But on the other hand, if you own a DVD, you can play it, period. This, however, requires new laws. Without new laws, the NFL's policy is in line with the law. They're even somewhat fair about it, in the sense that sports bars do not have to pay to have TVs in them, unless they are so large as to be considered the primary attraction of the bar, rather than simply a bonus.

Either way, TFA is just FUD. If you aren't a public performance, you can't run afoul of copyright law. No matter how many buddies you invite over, and no matter that you charge them for your beer, it's not a public performance, because it's a private showing still. The nonsense about "you can't call it a Super Bowl party because that's trademarked" is quite stupid, but no more stupid than any other corporation going overboard defending their trademarks. Intel suing prison programs because they use "inside" to refer to those in prison, and Intel owns "Noun Inside"? I'd say the Super Bowl BS is demonstrably less retarded, as at least these parties are actually using the trademarked term, even if using a trademark to refer to the actual trademarked item is supposed to be allowed!

No. Really. Obama wasted a god damn year, trying to appease the republicans to get one republican vote on anything. He failed. The last thing you can accuse him of is being partisan. An unrealistic optimist? sure. A liar? sure, he is a politician after all. A failure? Absolutely.

But that's not what happened. They put in strong bills. Then the Republicans balk. So the Dems soften them, and again and again, then put them up for a vote that doesn't get a Republican vote. They should have put up a strong bill, made it stronger, and told the Republicans to fuck themselves.

Again, the Dems get power, and waste it. At least that's better than the Republicans, who get power and use it...

A year of Pelosi and Reid blocking any Republican bill from the floor is "nonpartisan"? Including blocking THREE Republican health-care bills from discussion while lying their asses off claiming the Republicans were "not offering alternatives"???

This is a rather too often repeated bit of misinformation. The reality is that the fundamental difference between Republican "alternatives" and the health care bills proposed by democrats is that these alternatives were simply bills related to health care (not comprehensive health care alternatives), covered entirely or by one or more of the existing democratic bills. Thus, the functional proposal Republicans were making was: don't do that or, at best, don't do all of that.

There's nothing wrong with thinking we don't need to overhaul the health care system in the U.S. (I think it demonstrates a fundamental lack of understanding of the math involved, since there's no way that the current levels of spending are maintainable, but it's a valid opinion). What's not valid is claiming that there's anything disingenuous in pointing out that these aren't actually alternatives so much as an oft-reiterated "no."

Face it, the NFL are brilliant. They are not about football. They are about revenue. They had two goals in mind when setting out on their broadcasting endeavor:

a) Sell high-cost adspace
b) Get people to care about the adspace

Now you hear people always saying "I watch the superbowl for the commercials!" Mission A-Ccomplished NFL. Was that enough? It's never enough. So the last 10 years have been their attempt to make more money by becoming some of the biggest douchebags in the IP industry.

"That's the thing about greed, Arch, it's blind. And it doesn't know when to stop" -- Lenny Cole

Which is completely unenforceable, since you're allowed to use trademarks for the purpose of referring to the item. Meaning that they might get upset about you calling it a "Super Bowl party" but if you have a party where you watch the "Super Bowl" there isn't really anything they can do about it.

Which is completely unenforceable, since you're allowed to use trademarks for the purpose of referring to the item. Meaning that they might get upset about you calling it a "Super Bowl party" but if you have a party where you watch the "Super Bowl" there isn't really anything they can do about it.

It may be unenforceable, but the NFL has been making a lot of noise about this for some time. They seem to count on the fact that a lot of small businesses will just cow-tow to them after a phone call from a lawyer.

I noticed in our local newspaper yesterday there was an ad from a sports bar - the phrase "Super Bowl" was nowhere to be seen. The biggest text was "Come watch the Big Game with us!", and some other text referred to their "Big Game Party".

Just don't charge for food, or call it a 'Super Bowl' party, since the term itself is copyright."

I'd like to hear a lawyer stand up and say that with a straight face. Trademarked? Possibly. Copyright? Not likely. And even it was a registered mark, I fail to see what food has to do with anything, or how it would be actionable unless the rightsholder is organising similar events that might be confused with whatever private viewing we're talking about here.

I do know that a couple of years ago, media organizations stopped referring to events they were sponsoring as "Super Bowl Random Event" but instead started to refer to them as "Big Game Random Event". Frequently they would make a point about not being able to use Super Bowl to refer to the event because of licensing issues with the NFL. At the time I thought that the NFL was shooting themselves in the foot. What makes the Super Bowl such a big money maker for them is its cultural ubiquity in the U.S.. If there are not a lot of events planned around the game, people will pay less attention to the game. If too many of the events planned around the game are "Big Game" events rather than "Super Bowl" events, it will diminish the value of the words "Super Bowl".

Okay, not completely. You cannot make a "direct charge" to "see or hear the transmission," though you can apparently ask friends to cover the cost of food and drink. You also cannot further transmit the broadcast "to the public," so diverting a live video stream onto the Internet and streaming it to the world is right out. Otherwise, you're fine.

when you start charging for food, you move from being a collection of friends to a sport bar, and sports bars don't get fair use.

This is wrong. In a lot of ways.

First, as has been said many times in these comments already, we're dealing with TM when using the term "Superbowl" and copyright when we dealing with showing it on TV. Though you probably don't know it, and besides the fact that a bar would also have to serve alcohol, the statutory exception you're referring to is an exception to the copyright rights. Certain kinds of establishments are allowed to violate the holder's copyright (and here I mean the prima facie violation o

You missed the one important part, anywhere there is money involved there will be claims. The NFL is claiming ownership of a fan derived saying, let alone one where most of it has been part of the dialect

There are sports nerds. The guys who memorize every stat for everyone on all thirty-something teams. I may not partake in that, but I will recognize it as something nerd.
Of course, we are both going to be sued by the NFL for using the words in the comment title, so who cares? See you in court, co-defendant.

No, there are not. This is part of the mainstream trying to take the terms geek and nerd from us, after we made them cool. Geeks and nerds have no interest in sports whatsoever. They view them as the childish games they are. If you are interested in sports, you are certainly not a geek. Probably not even a nerd. No exceptions.

Amen! That's why I not only shun sports, I also don't have a gaming console in my house and also avoid partaking in so-called "computer games", for I view them as the childish games they are. Oh, and don't get me started on role-playing games - it's just playing "house" with dice! How childish is that?!

<blockquote>Nerds do not memorize meaningless trivia without good reason.</blockquote>

What are the good reasons for being able to:

recite scenes from Monty Python movies/episodes verbatim,name 5 or more droids from Star Wars (original trilogy) not counting R2-D2 or C-3PO,recite monster stats for an edition of D&D,tell you his favorite XKCD comics by number,etc.

That's another thing I don't get. We spend so much time and effort avoiding advertisement, inventing technology to avoid having to see it, then once a year, when companies are spending millions of dollars for a 30 second ad that they'll show probably just that one time, everybody is like, "z0mg !!!!!!11!!one gotta watch the ads!!" That's some ol' bullshit right there.Hey, advertisers -- you really want to get people's attention? Rather than waste money on a super bowl ad, rent out some cheap billboard sl

I think you answered your own (implied) question in your post. People take measures to avoid being forcibly subjected to advertisement when they don't want to be, or when it's an inconvenience to them (I'm looking at you, unskippable DVD previews!). Watching ads willingly when desired is not inconsistent with this.

Just don't...call it a 'Super Bowl' party, since the term itself is copyright.

The term is not copyrighted. The term is trademarked.

The trademark status has advantages and disadvantages. Since it's been registered and in use for at least 5 years (since 1969 in fact), the trademark is much harder to invalidate, per 15 USC 1065 [cornell.edu]. Unlike copyrights, trademarks really do last forever, given proper maintenance (yes, I realize that copyrights practically last forever too, but there are trademarks that are centuries old).

Some of the disadvantages of a trademark are that the remedies are weaker (no statutory damages) and the trademark holder must police the mark. You can't license it to just anybody. You have to maintain some control over the licensed good or service, typically in the form of quality standards. You also have to go after potential infringers. Failure to do so can lead to losing the mark.

It's that last requirement that is driving the NFL's actions here (well, that and the money to be made). Whether the law in fact requires them to be as strict about it as they are is another question, one that very few people on Slashdot are really competent to answer. Whether the law should require them to be so strict, however, is a different question and one that most of us probably agree on the answer to.

As a side note, footage of individual games is copyrighted. The NFL argues that footage of the game is licensed only for private viewing and not for commercial viewing, which is how they go after sports bars and the like. I would argue that if you put your game on the public airwaves, it should be fair game for live viewing. If they want to enter into a more restrictive license with the viewer they should put the game on pay per view, a premium channel, or a cable channel at the very least.

It could be worse. They could be claiming a trademark an a symbol that is thousands of years old and has been iconic and representative of a house of nobles, a city founded under their reign and an entire culture for several hundred years or the symbol of a major social organization or perhaps even an official state symbol... Oh wait, they ARE. Several restaurants in New Orleans have been sued for trademark infringement by the NFL over the use of the Fleur De' Lis, a symbol that some of them have been since before the NFL existed.

The NFL argues that footage of the game is licensed onlyThe NFL argues that footage of the game is licensed only

Aye, there's the rub. I haven't licensed a darned thing from the NFL, ever. We need to entirely do away with BS "licensing" like "by viewing this web site...". No, sorry, I agree to your terms by signing a contract, period. I don't agree to your terms by viewing a web site, watching a TV, rubbing my nose, or yelling Yabba Dabba Do. The very notion that I agreed to 34 pages of legalese by doin

"Will Your Super Bowl Party Anger the Copyright Gods?" They're hardly gods; a more precise term would be "demons" or "devils".

The bar I go to has two TVs, if they show it on the big one they'll be in violation. TFA doesn't say what happens if you give food away, as the one mentioned will (regular readers of my journal will know the name of the bar). If I remember correctly, Sanmy's Sports Bar downtown doesn't have any screens smaller than 55 inches. It seems ironic that a sports bar can't show sports! And e

These things end the same every time and rarely have any kind of interesting twist.

In fact, they're composed of smaller units which are similar to the larger. This Menger Sponge of entertainment can claim an average of only 17 minutes of actual action in an event that ostensibly takes one hour yet occupies an entire afternoon to stage.

It's the ultimate in mass-produced manufactured entertainment. I can't understand why it's still so popular.

Don't they make their money off commercials? Why should someone have to pay for having people over to watch those commercials? I think sports bars are much less likely to change channels during commercials to catch 3 minutes of Family Guy, so their advertisements will be more effective than in many private homes.

I think a reasonable arrangement would be if you had to report it to the NFL, saying "I'll be having an NFL party in a bar that can have 80 people inside", so the NFL can use those numbers to get more money from their advertisers. If anything, they should be paying YOU.

NFL Fan: "Hey, Joe's Pub has a 60" TV, and they're going to have the Big Game on. Sweet! Ten friends and I are gonna have a great time there!"

NFL Management: "Alert! Fans watching our games in public without our express written consent. We've clearly just lost MILLIONS in revenue because of this. If only our viewers understood the logic of... uh, ummm, ah... Hey, why DO we prohibit this? It brings people together to enjoy our product, stimulates the economy by bringing patrons to bars and casual dining restaurants, and generally helps promote what we do without costing us anything in advertising expenses."

[rant]Instead of passively witnessing multimillionaire drug addicts chase a ball to sell ad space... do something. Take the people who were going to show up for "da big game" outside to play tag football. Have a foosball championship. Play card games. Have a LAN party. Play DnD. Do something.

The outcome of the game will be the same whether you watch it or not.

Whatever teams are playing this year are branches of a company. Do you care which 7-11 sold the most hotdogs? Or if the Pepsi bottling plant on the east coast produced more soda than the west coast plant? Even if it is your home team, the players aren't from your town. They're employees shuffled around or chasing contracts. At least the local high school games have some attachment to you.

Go ahead and mod me troll or flambait if i've hurt your feelings and doing something to me will make you feel better about how you've spent your Sundays. Just take a moment to consider *doing* something instead of watching others. And if the team you cheered for won... don't say "we won". If you didn't leave a drop of blood or sweat on the field... you were not a part of that victory. You're a witness, that's it. Watching something someone else did is not an accomplishment and no reason to be proud. The team won. You watched.[/rant]

[rant]
Instead of passively witnessing multimillionaire drug addicts chase a ball to sell ad space... do something. Take the people who were going to show up for "da big game" outside to play tag football. Have a foosball championship.
[/rant]

What, wasting your valuable time playing a meaningless trivial thing like foosball instead of doing something productive with your time like reading and discussing Joyce's Ulysses?

Believe or not, I love computer programming AND sports. And you are ignorant if you think sports is just a passive mindless activity. Sports works on multiple levels. First it is a social activity--an excuse for people to get together to enjoy each others company---not really that different from a foosball tournament or a card game or going to a movie. Most of the enjoyment of a card game is not the card game itself--it is socializing with others. Same with sports.

Second, for a true sports fan the sport is more than just a passive activity. Fans analyze and appreciate the nuances of tactics, strategy, and individual skill throughout the game. The reason that sports people are unfamiliar with are "boring" is they don't see and are not aware of the details. Baseball is a very boring sport, unless you understand the pitcher/batter matchup. Then it is very exciting. Knowing what pitches the pitcher throws, how well they throw them, what the batters strengths and weakness are. The situation with who is on base, what the score is, how tired the pitcher is, etc. Same with football (ie soccer) or American football or any sport. The defensive alignment of an American football team, the offensive execution of a basketball team, the trap play of a hockey team. For a fan, much of the fun is trying to predict what will happen and watching it play out.

Then, much like the Olympics, there is the sheer amazing in watching what the human body can do. To perform an athletic feat that is seemingly impossible.

Finally, with things like fantasy football, there is a sort of meta-level game that you are apart of.